Jolla Community Intro Series: JollaSuomi and Toni Aaltonen

Following our new tradition of introducing key community members to the public via our official blog, today we have Toni Aaltonen, the founder and editor in chief at the infamous Finnish blog, JollaSuomi.

James Noori: Hi Toni! Please introduce yourself to the community, although I’m pretty sure that you are a well known being in Jolla and Sailfish community especially the Finnish community since JollaSuomi is one of the best Jolla-dedicated blogs in our community supporting Jolla and Sailfish through the thick and thin.

Toni Aaltonen: Greetings to James and the whole Jolla community. My name is Toni Aaltonen, I’m 31 years old and I currently live in Finland in a city called Lahti. I’m currently selling magazines over the phone, I’ve been doing it for 3 years now. It’s not the most appreciated job, but u got to do something in order to pay the bills. In Lahti I live with my wife and our 8 year old dog.

JN: How did you get into Jolla and Sailfish OS? Tell us about your background with Jolla/Sailfish OS and the reason you chose to start blogging about us?

TA: Actually back then I had no idea that there will be a new company that would make new phones, but after Jolla tweeted that famous first tweet, I got curious! The more I put my head into the company I was sold. I kept reading everything I could find online and be excited at(sorry about that). First I created JollaSuomi Twitter account and as I saw it grow I created JollaSuomi.fi blog. It’s been great to be part of this community and I will always produce more content on it.

JN: How did you start blogging? Was JollaSuomi your first blog? Did you do similar things in the past?

TA: Well I started blogging because I was very interested of technology in general. It all started in 2009 with my first blog, tonistechblog.com. Maybe you’ve heard of it as it was mentioned multiple times in big tech sites like The Verge, Engadget etc. Tonistechblog was my first blog and it was in English, but after few years I lost interested to it and really I didn’t have the time to write blog posts very often. In years I have had few other blogs too, but nothing as popular as Jollasuomi.fi . I love blogging and being part of the community, it’s always nice to put y own thoughts to the posts and I hope they are as interesting to read as they are to write.

JN: How would you improve Jolla? What would be the key thing for Jolla to do in order to improve what we do?

TA: I think it’s very good that Jolla is now concentrating in software and developing it better. I would love to see paid apps in Jolla store, I think that would be huge for the developers and it would engage more people to develop apps for Sailfish OS.

JN: What do you think of the Jolla C device so far?

TA: Well I think its a pretty okay smartphone, definitely better than the first Jolla. I love the screen size and honestly think that first Jolla should have been similar in size. Of course there is something bad also, as in my test the battery life was very poor. I charged the phone to 100% in the evening and went to sleep, in the morning when i woke up the battery was empty. I didn’t touch the phone whole time, it didn’t have WiFi or cellular data on. It might not be because of the hardware of the Jolla C, but instead its the software. So it can definitely be fixed by an update.

JN: Tell us about the Finnish audience! We all know that a huge portion of Jolla and Sailfish OS fans are from Finland, the birthplace of Jolla. How do they embrace Sailfish OS? Do you have a large audience on your blog?

TA: Of course my readers are the best and they are actually a very engaging community. They are always liking and commenting my posts across social media. They are also a very demanding community and I’m not saying this as a bad thing, but as a good thing and it actually pushes me to do much better posts and I want to thank all my Finnish community members for reading my posts and engaging them. I have quite big audience in my blog and it’s surely helping that I have 3700 followers on Twitter and 1800 Likes in Facebook. JollaSuomi isn’t doing as good as it was in the first year, but I’m hopeful that things will be looking better in the future again!

JN: Any words to the readers of Jolla blog?

TA: I want to thank everyone of you for making this community one of the best across the internet. I have met awesome people because of this community and many I consider as my close friends. Let’s keep on being the best community ever and help Jolla to push Sailfish OS to the next level.

JN: Thank you Toni for taking the time and answering to my questions and for your suggestions regarding Jolla’s improvements. Thank you also for the amazing image you made to feature on this blog post!
And thank you all for reading this. We will have more of these plus other exciting community engagements which will lead us to be an even better community!